robert.admin – Page 18 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

June 1, 2025

The Unfeeling Sky (Review)

was something like ten years old, visiting the Wright Patterson AFB museum. In the gift shop were a number of aviation novels (remember those quaint old days when people actually read?). Plucked this one off the shelf and loved it. So Frank Thompson is an infantry officer in World War One. While in the shitty, muddy trenches, he watches his childhood friend get shot down into no mans’ land, and the hun that does it comes back around and kills him. Thompson watches the German buzz away, noting his distinctive aircraft paint scheme. And then he joins the Royal Flying […]

May 29, 2025

OpsLog – LM&O – 5/28/2025

wo years ago, I was writing weekly pieces on train ops to a Facebook N-scale page. Reverend Jim and John DV know this guy who hosts it (“knew”, rather). Anyway, I’d also add our OpsLogs to his page so his readers could enjoy our massive sessions. And you know me – I try to punch up the sessions with drama and humor. Well, after one submission, the guy responds (I don’t remember verbatim – I left the page following this). Anyway, he told us me that we needed to get better. This chaos and confusion was amateur-level stuff and clearly […]

May 29, 2025

Education (DOG EAR)

We don’t need no education! -Pink Floyd (The Wall) Yes you do; you just used a double-negative! -Moss (The IT Crowd) here seems to be a discouraging trend in modern America, the idea that college and education is overrated, that plumbers own boats and liberal arts students own debt, that native intelligence is more than enough to get through life happy, wealthy and successful. I don’t know if this is a drive on some dark cabal of anti-intellectuals to dumb down the voting citizenry. After all, we recently elected the biggest idiot on the block and his base is cheering […]

May 25, 2025

OpsLog – FEC – 5/24/2025

nother Grand Day Out on the Florida East Coast over in Palm Bay. And if you think it’s all about running trains, no, it’s about all the stuff it takes to get together, to exchange greetings, eat too many cookies and get ready for top-level operations on this fully-signaled line. The setup was good. Rode over with Kyle and Terry, JB and me in the back seat. No Brightlines spotted, alas, but lunch at Culvers was good. All the usual guys showed at the Farnhams’, with JB and Jack talking about their shared butterfly fetish, me chatting with Chip, Al […]

May 25, 2025

Dungeons and Drama (Review)

kay, Hell is freezing over. Pigs are flying. Dogs and cats are living together. I read a romcom. I’m in a Sunday evening class and when our old bookstore closed, I thought we were done. But then the class reformed in the same space, new owners. But this bookstore, The New Romantic, is a Romance bookstore. Not really my thing. But I was there early one night, poking around the store just before they closed, and I found Dungeons and Drama, a YA romance about a high school drama student, Riley, who is forced to work in her father’s game store as […]

May 21, 2025

OpsLog – YVRR – 5/20/2025

he best thing about retirement (among many entries) is the fact that on a Tuesday afternoon I could cruse over to Cocoa, spool some time reading under a tree, then putter over to buddy Jack’s house for a session on the Yosemite Valley Railroad, a neat little bedroom line that has recently added another ten or so feet of running distance. Greg managed to make it this time so it wasn’t me running everything. Now I got to run with attention to what I was doing and really enjoy it. Not that I didn’t enjoy it last time, but I […]

May 18, 2025

Footfall (Review)

ead this very thick scifi back went it came out in ’85 when I was through with one degree and working on another. This was back, kids, when the scifi section in the many neighborhood bookstores were on thick sets of shelves and not a bunch of weak image-based bullshit. Think about it – StarWars was still just a movie (not a religion) and many young people still read. Okay, gripe done. So in Footfall, and intelligent race of (wait for it) elephants coasts into our solar system with the intent of taking over Earth. The first thing they do is […]

May 15, 2025

OpsLog – TBL – 5/14/2025

ecky was sitting in the back of her parents’ overloaded Buick, rolling out of some Pennsylvania backwoods town, Tuskawhosit or something. Her dad had to stop for directions (again). They were trying to find the town Becky’s mom’s sister lived in; Westly. Staying two weeks with her coal-mining relatives did not excite her at all. Mom: “They have a canoe.” Becky: “The river is sludge.” Mom: “You can watch all the trains.” Becky: “I hate trains.” Mom: “Look at the fall colors on the trees!” Becky: “…” They were just rumbling down the beat-up two lane road out of town, […]

May 15, 2025

Chatterbox(DOG EAR)

f I know one thing about myself, it’s that I talk too much. I know that’s where my writing has all come from, the desire to get a story out, regardless of how long it takes, to share it with the world. The problem with this (and with the world) is that it really doesn’t care. The world has better things to do. And the older you get, the more things you experience, but the less people want to hear it. Young people have shorter attention spans. They don’t have time for a long story or joke to develop, to […]

May 11, 2025

OpsLog – LM&O (SNS) – 5/10/2025

kay, so this was a test flight. We were confident in our flight worthiness. Experienced crews. Casual weekend. Fully planned. With crosswinds. And thunderstorms. And the lights and radars were out. And a UFO was stooging about the boundary fence. We’d all come out for a Saturday Night Special, where fewer people means more elbow room and a chance to engage in more difficult operations. It’s rather fun, a challenge. Tonight was a two-for – TT&TO ops in a new and untested format, and an interlocking district (run by a towerman and signaller) in the Lehigh to Bethlehem stretch. First […]